If you only want to edit photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is probably your best bet. It is much cheaper than Photoshop and has almost as many features, if not a few more to do with photos, albums, printing, collages etc.

I bought a magazine the other day called ” Photoshop Elements Essentials” and it had a 30 day trial of Photoshop Elements 6. Included were a number of tutorials which you may also be able to get at Lynda.com

I just checked this and you cannot access the free tutorials. But you can get them from Learning Photoshop Elements.

Today, I tried the Extractor tool. I’d been trying this on Photoshop without much luck.

Choose a photo which would look even better if only one feature was highlighted onto a white background instead of the background you currently have, like sport shot.

This is a shot from an Australian Open Tennis championship which I took.

Now to extract just an image of Sam,

1. Select Image> Magic Extractor
2. It took a while to do this and I didn’t get a perfect result, but you use the Foreground Brush to select Sam and the Background Brush to select the background. Cover as much of both areas as you can. Then go to Preview. Photoshop Elements will extract the image for you.
3. If you are not happy with the results you can use the Point Eraser Tool.
Result